I wonder. I dont have answers. I am a mother. A grandmother. I just so heart-heavy wonder how, and yes, I hold the woman to the higher heart bond with her little six month old child…. how can a woman who is so far grown, not a teenager, a woman closer to age 30 than 20… how can a woman who has had the sanctity of giving birth, and yes, it is painful, and yes it can be beyond torturous to give birth… and yet the amnesia of love soon takes over for most mothers: the pain remembered, but not foreground. The little baby, so darling and warm and softskinned and tiny toed and with little hands takes all the foreground. All. Steals one’s heart entirely.
I wonder how a woman who meets and has sex with a man whom she has apparently not been introduced to through conservative/traditional means, how a woman, presumed beautiful of face and body, undresses her body of her traditional clothing and puts on the secular clothing of those she apparently hates. Does she tie back her hair or let it fly loose? Does she wear stockings or is she naked legged? Are her shoes new or worn? Is she still nursing and does she bind her breasts so that when she murders she does not leak milk? Did she leave breast milk with the grandmother to give to the baby? Had she yet begun to menstruate again? Was the the evil one who not ‘radicalized’– such a poor word, but rather, led and misled her claimed lover to absolute death–was it ‘the woman’ the cherchez la femme, ‘look for the woman’ at the bottom of this evil?
I wonder that a woman, any woman, although I know not all men or women have the parental instinct to cherish and never leave inscribed deeply at first, perhaps, depending on circumstances, ever… I wonder that a woman, for the angels’ sakes, a mother who carried the little fluttering butterfly for nine months, could possibly leave her child behind, could possibly think her child would be able to withstand life given what the child’s mother and father had planned in murder that would live on, not as a glory, but as utter blackhearted evil.
I wonder about the woman, did she profess her love for her husband at the last moment in the SUV. Did she scream out in Arabic, I love you! And if so, why did she not choose her own child, over anyone or anything else? Did she say to her child, Goodbye little one, mommie will be back soon. Did she lie to her child like she lied to the grandmother?
We know that when one takes up arms with the idea of killing innocent others wholesale that one knows there is little likelihood of surviving to live to see another birthday, even if one were to run into the desert and find a cave to hide in. Eventually death comes. Either by law enforcement, by self inflicted death, by a vigilante, or a fellow prisoner who has ‘decency amongst theives’ and who is not a murderer, or by the inevitability of being called out/ betrayed, or by the unpredictability of Nature.
I think of the little girl child. I know the community will rally around the little one. I feel certain listening to some of the very young men at the mosque speaking of their abject shock that a mother would betray her own child, that the women [and men] of the inner community and the larger community… will flow together to cover the ragged hole the mother has left for her child to navigate, not only now… but someday, also, as the child grows in consciousness, in the future.
And we never know do we, sometimes the children of the abjectly wrong-headed, are in themselves radiant peacemakers in some cases, or just hopefully have a chance and protection to live quietly and hopefully happily in times yet to come. I know many of us hope that for this little one. Despite the greatest lie of all, from mother to child… allowing the little one no goodbye, no choice, a little child, who at six months developmentally has just learned to say in such a sweet little voice, often wreathed in smiles or pleading for attention to her needs: Mama.
How one could leave a little one who has made YOU her first word–it is beyond understanding.
May all innocents be comforted in every way.